Who's blocking part-timers?

Friday

Jul 27, 2007 at 2:00 AM

The news from the Pew Research Center this month — that 60 percent of working mothers say they'd prefer to work part time — was barely out before it was sucked up into the fetid air of the mommy wars, with all the usual talk on "opting out" and guilting out, and the usual suspects lining up to slug it out on morning talk TV.

Judith Warner

The news from the Pew Research Center this month — that 60 percent of working mothers say they'd prefer to work part time — was barely out before it was sucked up into the fetid air of the mommy wars, with all the usual talk on "opting out" and guilting out, and the usual suspects lining up to slug it out on morning talk TV.

But the conversation we should be having these days really isn't one about What Mothers Want. (This has been known for years; surveys dating back to the early 1990s have shown that up to 80 percent of mothers — working and at-home alike — consistently say they wish they could work part time.) The interesting question is, rather, why they're not getting it.

Only 24 percent of working mothers now work part time. The reason so few do isn't complicated: most women can't afford to. Part-time work doesn't pay.

Women on a reduced schedule earn almost 18 percent less than their full-time female peers with equivalent jobs and education levels, according to research by Janet Gornick, a professor of sociology and political science at City University of New York, and the labor economist Elena Bardasi. Part-time jobs rarely come with benefits. They tend to be clustered in low-paying fields like the retail and service industries. And in better-paid professions, a reduced work schedule very often can mean cutting down from 50-plus hours a week to 40-odd — hardly a "privilege" worth paying for with a big pay cut.

It doesn't have to be this way. In Europe, significant steps have been made to make part-time work a livable reality for those who seek it. Denying fair pay and benefits to part-time workers is now illegal. Parents in Sweden have the right to work a six-hour day at prorated pay until their children turn 8. Similar legislation helps working parents in France, Austria and Belgium and any employee in Germany and the Netherlands who wants to cut back.

Even Britain has a (comparatively tame) pro-family law that guarantees parents and other caregivers the right to request a flexible schedule from their employers. European employers have the right to refuse workers' requests, but research shows that very few actually do. And workers have the right to appeal the denials.

None of this creates a perfect world. Feminists have long been leery of part-time work policies, which tend to be disproportionately used by women, mommy-tracking them, and placing them at an economic disadvantage within their marriages and in society. The American model of work-it-out-for-yourself employment is Darwinian, but women's long working hours have gone a long way toward helping them advance up the career ladder.

"We know that family-friendly policies encourage work force participation," says Gornick, who has extensively studied family policy on both sides of the Atlantic. "But do they lower the glass ceiling or make it thicker? That's the million-euro question."

I think that when it comes to setting priorities for (currently nonexistent) American work-family policy, we ought to go for the greatest good for the greatest number.

The place to start, ideally, would be universal health care, which is really the necessary condition for making freedom of choice a reality for working parents. European-style regulations outlawing wage and benefit discrimination against part-time workers would be nice, too, though it's not a terribly realistic goal for the U.S., where even unpaid family leave is still a hot-button issue for employers.

A British-style "soft touch" law could, however, be within the realm of the possible. Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rep. Carolyn Maloney are circulating draft legislation modeled on the British workplace flexibility law that would give employees — all workers, not just moms or parents — the right to request a flexible schedule. The legislation — which would require employers to discuss flexibility with workers who request it, but wouldn't require them to honor the requests — has a little bit of something for everyone: protection from retaliation for workers who fear letting on that they're eager to cut back, protection from "unfunded mandates" for businesses.

Critics might say the proposed legislation's touch is so soft as to be almost imperceptible, but it's a start. At the very least, it's a chance to stop emoting about maternal love and war and guilt and have a productive conversation.